Discovery skills training
Unlock the full potential of your sales conversations with discovery skills training. Learn how to ask better questions, qualify faster, and connect your solution to what truly matters to your prospects.
Discovery skills training
One of the most critical elements in sales cycles is gathering the necessary information to propose the right solution.
Improve your discovery skills in customer conversations and initial sales demos to increase success rates in identifying, progressing, and closing business. These skills are not just essential for individual performance, but are also core components of your broader sales enablement strategy.
Your team learns sales enablement to better understand your customer: exploring pain and identifying critical business issues, quantifying value, getting more from stakeholder conversations at different levels, and using customer success stories as discovery tools. All of this builds a stronger foundation for impactful demos.
Sufficient Discovery is when:
- You have collected sufficient information to confidently and clearly propose a precise solution;
- Your prospect believes that you have sufficient understanding of their situation;
- Your team can provide value to each stakeholder.
Key benefits of our discovery skills training
Decrease No-Decision
Consistently communicate value
Increase probability of success for demo outcomes
Reduce the length of the sales cycles
Expand opportunity breadth and depth
Becoming a trusted advisor
You will learn how to
- Expand prospects’ vision of their problems and bias towards your solutions.
- Enable value conversations by addressing the ‘So What’.
- Commercially teach the customer about trends in the market.
- Connect customer success stories to the client’s business goals and objectives.
- Understand key elements and methods for conducting discovery.
- Apply and practice specific discovery techniques.
- Identify critical business issues and underlying problems.
- Establish a relationship of trust with the client
Assessment your team’s discovery skills
Many sales and presales practitioners say they are skilled at doing Discovery – but are they? Here’s a simple method to assess, based on five levels of increasing proficiency:
Level 1: Uncovers statements of pain.
Level 2: Uncovers pain and explores more deeply.
Level 3: Uncovers pain, explores deeply, broadens the pain and investigates the impact.
Level 4: Uncovers pain, explores and broadens, investigates impact and quantifies.
Level 5: Uncovers pain, explores and broadens, investigates impact, quantifies and reengineers vision.
In-Company Discovery Skills Training
Are your team’s discovery skills not at level 5? This will affect your conversation rates, your demos, your yearly revenue. Don’t worry; there are ways to improve! We offer Discovery skills trainings to elevate your team to level 5 or higher.
Tailored to you
Our customers highly value our three levels of customization. It is what sets us apart, and it’s one of the ways that we add value to their experience with us.
Firstly, we tailor our demo training to your specific needs and your team’s. We identify problem areas and provide solutions that make a difference.
Our second customization pillar centres on adapting the content to suit your software and industry. This ensures that the information is easily understandable and practical for your daily activities, enabling you to apply new skills quickly.
Finally, we recognize that scheduling a workshop can be difficult. Whether it’s an in-person or online workshop, we are dedicated to making the process hassle-free. To accommodate your needs, our team is flexible and ready to collaborate with you to determine the best dates, times, and locations for your convenience.
Our journey ahead
To ensure that we provide tailored demo training that aligns with your specific situation and objectives, we will schedule a few calls to exchange ideas, discuss your goals, and identify areas where your team needs improvement. We align with your sales enablement plan.
Following that, we will require a deeper understanding of your software, customers, and typical scenarios. Therefore, we may request that you share recorded demos to advise on the best way to improve your team’s skills and create a plan of action. This will also provide us with a better understanding of your software, industry, and typical customer situations.
Afterwards, we will work with a team member to provide customized workshop examples utilizing your software and industry.
During our workshops, we strive to be flexible and accommodate each team member’s and individual’s specific needs to ensure that everyone can make the most of their learning experience. We want to reassure you that our support won’t end after the workshop. We’re committed to providing guidance and assistance for a whole year, so you can confidently apply your newly acquired skills.
Let’s discuss how we can tailor a workshop to the needs of your team.
FAQ
Why should we invest in our discovery skills?
Reducing Sales Cycle Time:
By understanding the client’s needs upfront, your sales process is more streamlined, reducing the time to close and increasing the overall efficiency of the sales cycle.
Personalized solutions:
You can tailor your software solution to the specific needs and pain points of the client. This personalization often makes the difference between closing a sale and losing a potential customer. We align with your sales enablement plan.
Building trust:
Effective discovery processes show the client that the sales team is genuinely interested in understanding their needs and providing a solution, rather than just making a sale. This builds trust and strengthen the relationship.
Increasing Sales Effectiveness:
Good discovery skills allow you to identify the most promising opportunities, which can save time and resources by focusing on the leads most likely to convert.
Reducing Churn:
When software is sold based on a thorough understanding of the client’s needs, the client is less likely to churn due to unmet expectations.
Increasing Customer Satisfaction:
A good discovery process can lead to more accurate product or solution recommendations, which in turn leads to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Job satisfaction of your team members:
- Winning just one or two more opportunities – to make quota.
- Winning just one or two more opportunities – to move to the next commission level.
- Winning just one or two more opportunities – to go to “President’s Club”.
Who should attend a Discovery Skills Training?
This training is ideal for those involved with sales processes. Solution consultants, sales engineers, technical account managers, and account executives who want to improve customer discovery conversations and drive more impactful demos.
What can you do to improve my discovery skills?
Here are a few paths to improvement:
Increase Revenues:
Doing Discover workshops to improve discovery skills focus on your specific objectives and situations in a workshop format. This is the most effective method to realize substantive, ongoing improvements – often with increased revenues within the quarter.
Stimulate Thinking:
Get a copy of Doing Discovery or purchase copies for your team. The book presents how to achieve surprisingly improved demos – and it is an easy read on a plane flight. It is available on Amazon.com in hardcopy, Kindle and Audiobook formats.
Ongoing Interest:
Explore our Articles or our Blog for tips, thoughts, techniques, practices, and the occasional rant on demos, or join the Great Demo! Doing Discovery Group on LinkedIn. We post topics and ideas for discussion, tips, and information on new tools. Group members contribute their thoughts, add comments to existing dialogues and raise new topics.
What is Discovery Skills Training and why is it important?
Discovery Skills Training helps all involved with sales processes to uncover what truly matters to prospects. Creating tailor-made demos, proposals, and conversations around real customer problems. It ensures you focus on value-based selling rather than generic feature dumps, shortening sales cycles and increasing win rates. We believe discovery skills training should be essential in your sales enablement.
What are the three dimensions of doing discovery?
1. What you ask
2. How you ask it
3. When to ask which question
In our discovery skills training, we’ll focus on a combination or all of these dimensions.
What key skills will I gain from a discovery skills training?
You’ll learn how to:
- Expand prospects’ vision of their problems and bias towards your solutions.
- Enable value conversations by addressing the ‘So What’.
- Commercially teach the customer about trends in the market.
- Connect customer success stories to the client’s business goals and objectives.
- Understand key elements and methods for conducting discovery.
- Apply and practice specific discovery techniques.
- Identify critical business issues and underlying problems.
- Establish a relationship of trust with the client
This aligns your discovery efforts with solution differentiation and deal progression.
Do you want to improve your discovery skills?